The Queen

[Mister Tee]

I think most people are going to like The Queen a lot – as I did. It takes a seemingly small, media-driven event – the Diana death frenzy – and puts it in a context that stretches from Edward VIII’s abdication/World War II to Tony Blair’s Labour victory and beyond (it even hints at the folly that is to take Blair down a decade later). It does this in a consistently engrossing, intelligent but entertaining framework, one that is scrupulously fair to all sides of the debate, and leaves one pondering where the right path truly lay. This is all directed with flair if not genius by Stephen Frears (Frears has never had a dynamic signature style, but his films are usually visually pleasing nonetheless). I think this is a very likely best picture nominee, and I’d be perfectly fine with that.

All this said, is it a great movie? That gets subjective, but I vote no. For me, a movie, however fine, doesn’t become great unless it takes me places I didn’t anticipate – becomes something I never imagined. The Queen is thoroughly excellent within the framework it sets up, but it never bursts the bounds.

That, too (more subjectivity) is how I view the heralded Mirren performance. I’m a big fan of Mirren’s, and she does a great job here. No one does dry better, and she beautifully conveys Elizabeth’s stuck-in-her-ways approach to life. She shows intelligence, but of a limited variety; she never flatters the audience by suggesting this woman is hipper to the situation than those around her (well, except Prince Phillip). It’s undeniably nice work…but, fittingly, of a rather recessive sort. This is a role almost entirely missing what we call Oscar scenes – the closest would be a late call to Blair, and her wordless encounter with the stag (which was a nice enough idea, but pushed too far – it flirted with “I am metaphor, hear me roar”). I’m sure many will suggest this is better than Oscar acting -- it’s “subtle” – and I honor those who hold this opinion. But, for me, her work, good as it is, never once gave me chills, or made me smile deeply (my personal criteria for judging a performance great). Put it this way: should she win best actress (and, as someone said elsewhere, she won’t lose to anyone out there so far), I’ll be content, but not ready to cheer (as I would have for, say, Staunton in ’04 or Moore in ’02).

Incidentally, I think Sheen is a near-sure contender for a supporting actor nomination. He’s perfect throughout – suggesting Blair in all his dimensions without sinking to imitation – and has a grade-A Oscar scene near the end of the film.

[flipp525]

Just saw this tonight. Mirren was fantastic -- a subtle transformation from the old monarchical views of private grief and mourning to the acceptance of a new "change of values". Her performance is gripping and honest and most assuredly places her as the frontrunner for the Oscar. In Elizabeth's quiet moment of humanity amidst the rushing waters where her car has broken down Mirren offers an almost voyeuristic glimpse. The elusive stag she comes into contact with almost seems to represent that very connection with her people she felt was slipping away. Her need to "mourn" the stag's death and pay her respects was a compelling parallel to the hunted Diana she gives homage to in the one of the film's final scenes.

[VanHelsing]

Michael Sheen could ride The Queen's wave as well. But then again, Supporting Actor category is quite packed already.

[rudeboy]

I'm always loathe to call the winner of a major oscar this early, but Mirren does look very hard to beat - more so than, say, Philip Seymour Hoffman this time last year, when Ledger and Phoenix seemed very much in play.

Also, I've been doubtful whether The Queen could manage much beyond actress and maybe screenplay nominations - but it's now looking a very likely best picture contender.

[99-1100896887]

Hugely good reviews here. I see where rottentomatoes rates it as 99%. Mirren has to be the one to catch, and apparently her nuanced character is astounding to behold. Can hardly wait to see it. Old monarchist from way back. Love the old thing.

[Sonic Youth]

Ebert emerges. Here's his first review in months.


The Queen

BY ROGER EBERT / October 13, 2006

The opening shots of Stephen Frears' "The Queen" simply show Helen Mirren's face as her character prepares for it to be seen. She is Queen Elizabeth II, and we know that at once. The resemblance is not merely physical, but embodies the very nature of the Elizabeth we have grown up with -- a private woman who takes her public role with great gravity.

Elizabeth is preparing to meet Tony Blair (Michael Sheen), the new Labor prime minister who has just been elected in a landslide. We see Blair preparing for the same meeting. His election was a fundamental upheaval of British political life after Thatcherism, and at that time, Britain stood on a threshold of uncertain but possibly tumultuous change.

Within months, the queen and Blair find themselves in a crisis that involves not politics but a personal tragedy that was completely unforeseen -- the death of Diana, princess of Wales, in a Paris car crash. "The Queen" tells the story of how her death with her boyfriend, the playboy department store heir Dodi Fayed, would threaten to shake the very monarchy itself.

Told in quiet scenes of proper behavior and guarded speech, "The Queen" is a spellbinding story of opposed passions -- of Elizabeth's icy resolve to keep the royal family separate and aloof from the death of the divorced Diana, who was legally no longer a royal, and of Blair's correct reading of the public mood, which demanded some sort of public expression of sympathy from the crown for "The People's Princess."

It was extraordinary, the grief that people felt after her death. I was reminded of the weeks after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Was it out of proportion to Diana's objective importance? She was a young woman almost cynically picked for her marriage, who provided the crown with its required heirs, who was a photogenic escort for Prince Charles, who found no love from her husband; it was no secret they both had affairs during their marriage. Once divorced, she made peculiar dating choices.

She died in a late-night crash while being pursued by paparazzi. Yet it was as if a saint had been taken from our midst. Yes, Diana devoted much time to doing good. Yes, I believe she was sincere. But doing good was part of her job description; she signed on for it. In death, she had the same impact as if a great national hero had died.

"The Queen" is told almost entirely in small scenes of personal conflict. It creates an uncanny sense that it knows what goes on backstage in the monarchy; in the movie, Queen Elizabeth, Prince Philip and the Queen Mother have settled into a sterile domesticity cocooned by servants and civil servants. It shows Tony and Cherie Blair (Helen McCrory) in their own bourgeois domestic environment. Both households, privately, are plain-spoken to the point of bluntness, and Cherie is more left wing than her husband, less instinctively awed by the monarchy, more inclined to dump the institution.

What Tony clearly sees is that the monarchy could be gravely harmed, if not toppled, by the Queen's insistence on sticking to protocol and not issuing a statement about Diana. The press demands that Elizabeth fly the flag at half-mast as a symbolic gesture at Buckingham Palace. Elizabeth stands firm. The palace will not acknowledge the death or sponsor the funeral.

"The Queen" comes down to the story of two strong women loyal to the doctrines of their beliefs about the monarchy, and a man who is much more pragmatic. The queen is correct, technically, in not lowering the flag to half-mast -- it is not a national flag, but her own, flown only when she is in residence. But Blair is correct that the flag has become a lightning rod for public opinion. The queen is correct, indeed, by tradition and history in all she says about the affair -- but she is sadly aloof from the national mood. Well, maybe queens should be.

Certainly that's what the Queen Mum thinks. Played by Sylvia Syms, she is shown at 90-plus years, still tart and sharp-witted. At the last minute, the palace needs a protocol plan for the funeral, and time is so short that the Queen Mum's own funeral plan has to be borrowed and modified. Syms has a priceless reaction where she learns that her honor guard, all servicemen, will be replaced by celebrities -- even, gasp, Elton John.

"The Queen" could have been told as a scandal sheet story of celebrity gossip. Instead, it becomes the hypnotic tale of two views of the same event -- a classic demonstration, in high drama, of how the Establishment has been undermined by publicity. I think it possible that Thatcher, if she still had been in office, might have supported the Queen. That would be impossible to the populist Blair.

Stephen Frears, the director, has made several wonderful films about conflicts and harmonies in the British class system ("My Beautiful Laundrette," "Dirty Pretty Things," "Prick Up Your Ears"), and "The Queen," of course, represents the ultimate contrast. No one is more upper class than the queen, and Tony Blair is profoundly middle class.

The screenplay is intense, focused, literate, observant. The dynamic between Elizabeth and Philip (James Cromwell), for example, is almost entirely defined by decades of what has not been said between them -- and what need not be said. There are extraordinary, tantalizing glimpses of the "real" Elizabeth driving her own Range Rover, leading her dogs, trekking her lands at Balmoral -- the kind of woman, indeed, who seems more like Camilla Parker-Bowles than Diana.

Mirren is the key to it all in a performance sure to be nominated for an Oscar. She finds a way, even in a "behind the scenes" docudrama, to suggest that part of her character will always be behind the scenes. What a masterful performance, built on suggestion, implication and understatement. Her queen in the end authorizes the inevitable state funeral, but it is a tribute to Mirren that we have lingering doubts about whether, objectively, it was the right thing. Technically, the queen was right to consider the divorced Diana no longer deserving (by her own choice) of a royal funeral. But in terms of modern celebrity worship, Elizabeth was wrong. This may or may not represent progress.

[Big Magilla]

Interesting interview with Frears by teh Hollywood Reporter's Anne Thompson.

OS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - At the Los Angeles premiere of director Stephen Frears' "The Queen" on Tuesday night, partygoers anointed Helen Mirren as the inevitable best actress Oscar winner for her bravura turn as the dowdily out-of-touch Queen Elizabeth II, but several Miramax Films marketing staffers were looking like deer frozen in headlights. That's because the last thing anyone wants to have happen this early in the developing awards season is to be named the Oscar front-runner.

"The Queen" is in better shape than other movies that have already fallen by the wayside, most notably Steve Zaillian's belly-flop "All the King's Men." As Martin Scorsese's "The Departed" might also prove, it is far preferable to enter awards contention without pretension than to wear your Oscar hopes on your sleeve. Frears knows this well. His studio pictures ("Hero," "Mary Reilly") have been less successful than such smaller films as "My Beautiful Laundrette," "The Grifters" and "Mrs. Henderson Presents."

"I retreated from the high budgets," he says. "The art wasn't the problem, it was the money."

"The Queen" has the advantage of starting as a small-scale, homegrown British project that moved on to the world stage at the Venice International Film Festival, where Mirren won the best actress prize, and the New York Film Festival, where it was selected as the opening-night film. After three weeks in U.K. cinemas, the drama is a smash -- for British moviegoers, it effectively plays as a sequel to the 2003 telefilm "The Deal." Also from Frears and his "Queen" collaborator, screenwriter Peter Morgan, that project was a Channel 4 dramatization of Prime Minister Tony Blair's relationship with his ally-turned-rival Gordon Brown, who is now poised to succeed him. As Blair, "Deal" starred Michael Sheen, who returns to play the prime minister in "Queen."

After the rapturous response to "Deal," its producers -- Andy Harries, Christine Langan and Tracey Seaward -- pursued the story of Blair's 1997 confrontation with the queen after Princess Diana's death and lined up Mirren to play Elizabeth. This time it had to be a feature, Frears explains, "because it's the queen. She lives in big rooms and houses, and you need money to do all that, you couldn't make it cheap enough for television."

Part of the filmmakers' challenge was to walk the tightrope of revealing these characters without satirizing them -- at a time when making fun of the royal family is daily sport in Britain. "It's completely ridiculous to have a modern country ruled over by this archaic family," Frears says. "They are in many respects a ridiculous family. They are very good at surviving. It was unusual to have taken them seriously. It hasn't been done ever before."

Building on his sources from "Deal," Morgan dug into his research, even renting a cottage at Balmoral and interviewing workers about the queen driving around the countryside in her Land Rover. The queen's affinity with animals inspired Morgan to use a noble stag that has eluded hunters for years as a metaphor. "If you make a film about a woman who doesn't engage in psycho-babble," Frears says, "it's a problem for a filmmaker. A scene like that gives you the opportunity to show she does have feelings."

The shock of the movie is that Mirren is able to make this stodgy powerful holdover of the Victorian Age deeply sympathetic. "That's Helen," Frears says. "You had to have that, in the end. The queen, who is now 80, is more loved than ever."

As for the queen's finger-snapping control of her beloved Corgis, "that was Helen, too," Frears says. "She knows how to do all that. Any dog would tremble when she'd come down the street. If she hadn't been so brilliant, there'd be no film. I go white at the thought. The idea of playing that part is so impertinent. It's a very cheeky thing to have done. The film itself is not cheeky. The idea of making the film was cheeky. We seem by the grace of God to have gotten away with it."

Every member of the British middle-class was brought up the same way as the queen, says Frears. "We were not made a fuss of. We were sent away to school. It's so deep in our psyches. She grew up during the war. Given that she was one of the richest women in the world, at the same time, her life was based on sacrifice, duty and discipline. That week (that Diana died) was the only time that she sort of made a mistake."

The "barbaric" arranged marriage between Britain's Prince Charles and Diana Spencer "was a catastrophe," Frears continues. "She turned out to be not what they thought she was: a well-brought-up English girl. She turned out to be like a Hollywood actress or a rock star. Diana's embracing of pop culture caused the complete conflict."

Wouldn't the Royals have been better off marrying Charles to the love of his life, Camilla Parker Bowles? Their thinking was "prehistoric," Frears says. "They didn't want other men saying, 'I've slept with the queen.' He was supposed to marry a virgin."

The queen got into a disastrous PR mess when she and her family withdrew to their Balmoral Castle retreat in Scotland and failed to express any remorse over the death of Diana. When the British tabloids turned on the queen, the recently elected Blair was forced to telephone and persuade her to make a public statement of grief. "It's about a woman experiencing doubt," Frears says.

Blair always understood how to manipulate the media. "He learned that from (President) Clinton," says Frears, who wishes he had done more in the film to underscore the role of the press in the whole Diana affair. "The first ones attacked were the paparazzi who pursued her. The press was keen to deflate that criticism. Their attack on the queen was systematic and deliberate."

Frears did shoot footage of a Diana look-alike in order to restage her death. "We couldn't just let the death be offscreen," he says. "We had to be willing to stand at the tunnel."

The director played out his instincts in the editing room as to what he could get away with and admits that he erred on the side of caution: "It seemed a good idea. We're making a film about a restrained woman. We were praised in England for being fair. It's difficult because they can't answer back. We could have made a much more cynical portrait. I'm prepared to admit to being a Queenist if not a monarchist."

Frears even made his choice of cinematographer Affonso Beato based on employing a dignified approach to shooting a "stately figure," says Frears, rather than have the camera go "all wobbling." By contrast, Frears shot the relatively humble prime minister's digs at 10 Downing Street, where Blair does the supper dishes, in 16mm. "He was a modern man, up all night with his babies under his arm," Frears says. "He was a popular man elected by a huge majority, thought to be the voice of the people."

It will not be lost on American moviegoers that Blair's deference to the queen is reflected in his ardent support of two U.S. presidents, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, which has proven politically damaging for him in the U.K. "It was galling to be making a film about Blair at his best while he's at his worst," Frears says. "(For Blair) to extend sympathy after 9/11 was entirely understandable, but to go from that to slavish support of the Iraq War has brought him down."

[Reza]

NY Times

September 29, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW | 'THE QUEEN'

However Heavy It Gets, Wear a Crown Lightly

By MANOHLA DARGIS

Is there something in the air, say, the stench of death and decline of empire, to have inspired the recent spate of films about imperial power? Fashionistas of course are already worshiping at the altar of “Marie Antoinette,” with its title bubblehead and hollow charms, while Forest Whitaker devotees are savoring the outré venality of Idi Amin in the rather too enthusiastically entertaining “Last King of Scotland.” Those who think more crowned heads should have rolled in the 18th century, in the meantime, can cozy up to “The Queen,” a sublimely nimble evisceration of that cult of celebrity known as the British royal family. (It opens the New York Film Festival tonight at Lincoln Center and in theaters tomorrow.)

Directed by Stephen Frears from a very smart script by Peter Morgan, who helped write “The Last King of Scotland,” also about crazy rulers and the people who love (and hate) them, “The Queen” pries open a window in the House of Windsor around the time of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, blending fact with fiction. It begins just days before her fatal car crash in 1997, when the princess, glimpsed only in television news clips and photographs, had completely transformed into Diana, the onetime palace prisoner turned jet-setting divorcée. The transformation was fit for a fairy tale: the lamb had been led to slaughter (cue Madonna’s “Like a Virgin”) and escaped in triumph (crank the Material Girl’s “Bye Bye Baby”). Elizabeth II wore the crown, but it was Diana who now ruled.

How heavy that crown and how very lightly Helen Mirren wears it as queen. With Mr. Frears’s gentle guidance, she delivers a performance remarkable in its art and lack of sentimentalism. Actors need to be loved, but one of Ms. Mirren’s strengths has always been her supreme self-confidence that we will love the performance no matter how unsympathetic the character. It takes guts to risk our antipathy, to invite us in with brilliant technique rather than bids for empathy. Even Mr. Whitaker’s Idi Amin seems to shed some tears. Ms. Mirren’s queen sheds a few too, but having climbed deep inside Elizabeth II, a vessel as heavily fortified as a gunship, she also coolly takes her character apart from the inside out, piece by machined piece.

This toughness is bracing, at times exhilarating, and it also reminds you of just how very good a director Mr. Frears can be; certainly it’s a relief after the shameless pandering in his last venture, “Mrs. Henderson Presents.” The new film serves as a return to form for the director not only of “Dangerous Liaisons” and “The Grifters,” both of which share with “The Queen” an interest in toxic tribal formations, but also of more freewheeling ensemble entertainments like “Sammy and Rosie Get Laid.” The focus in “The Queen” remains fixed on Elizabeth and her relationship with the newly elected prime minister, Tony Blair (Michael Sheen), but it also finds room for a host of smaller, precisely realized characters, each adding daubs of gaudy or grim color.

The secondary characters prove especially crucial because it’s through their dealings with the queen, their awe and boobishness (including James Cromwell’s dim-bulb Prince Philip), that we start to get a handle on her. A creature of history and ritual, Elizabeth might have been born in another century (or on another planet), a point Mr. Morgan lays out on the page and which Mr. Frears illustrates with lapidary attention to visual detail. Much of the story takes place inside Buckingham Palace and at Elizabeth’s Scottish estate Balmoral, sepulchers in which the royals have shut themselves up with their servants and riches. Certainly the Queen Mother (Sylvia Syms) seems half-dead already, her carefully planned funeral almost an afterthought. It’s no wonder the outside world seems so intrusive, even when its knocks are delivered by white glove.

Diana’s death interrupts Elizabeth’s sleep in more ways than one: a gentle hand comes knocking, and in time so does the rest of the world, which takes to the abbreviated life of Our Lady of Televised Confession with passion that in time borders on the religious, the hysterical, the mad. Shortly after Prince Charles (Alex Jennings, both sniveling and sly) brings Diana’s body back from Paris, the queen retreats to Balmoral without comment, not a hair on her tightly coiffed head out of place. Her stubborn quiet only fuels the clamorous sorrow of the public, which lays thousands of bouquets before Buckingham Palace, gestures of mourning that turn into a veritable barricade as overt in menace and purpose as the upturned paving stones of the French Revolution.

The ensuing crisis of confidence solidifies Blair’s power, bringing the monarchy one step closer to the oblivion it deserves. As Elizabeth strides around Balmoral in tweeds and sensible shoes, back in London Blair undergoes a metamorphosis of his own, becoming the official voice of healing.

Eager to please his masters, queen and public both, he makes the most of Diana’s death, setting his stamp on the next decade. His wife (Helen McCrory) can only cast an increasingly leery eye at his performance of grief. (Oh, to be a fly on that household wall.) She may not yet know it, but this is a battle, and she’s losing: Blair doesn’t just mourn Diana; he all but becomes a new sacrament, offering up his own touchy-feely persona for public consumption with smiles and moist eyes. There is something appealingly puppyish about the prime minister’s buzzing excitement as the crisis reaches its apex: he’s seizing the day like a bone. But like all dogs Blair needs someone to bring him to heel, and while Elizabeth’s authority is more ceremonial than actual, she and he play their part in the pantomime of power.

It’s this pantomime that fascinates Mr. Frears, who unmasks it as much as he does the queen, whose dusting of face powder and glazed stare pointedly evoke another, earlier, Elizabeth. Yet if the director shows us the woman beneath the Kabuki-like facade, it’s not to transform her into a softie, hankie at the ready; it’s to strip away the mystique that once shored up the monarchy’s real power and now merely serves as a fig leaf for its spoils.

Diana consecrates Blair, but so does Elizabeth, whose bafflement at the sharing-and-caring of “the people,” as she calls them, almost marks her for extinction. Her slow-dawning realization of the cultural shift that had already changed the country is beautifully realized, though not because the actress and her director mistake the queen’s intelligence for sentiment. Elizabeth no more likes Diana after death than before. When the queen does break her silence, as we know she will, having watched the moment on television once upon a time, it isn’t because of this vexing young woman. It’s because Elizabeth, standing alone in the Scottish countryside, Mr. Frears’s camera hovering close and then moving off to take in the glorious view, has finally understood not only the implications of her past but also those of the present.

“The Queen” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). There is some tart language.

THE QUEEN

Plays tonight at the New York Film Festival; opens commercially tomorrow.

Directed by Stephen Frears; written by Peter Morgan; director of photography, Affonso Beato; edited by Lucia Zucchetti; music by Alexandre Desplat; production designer, Alan Macdonald; produced by Christine Langan, Tracey Seaward and Andy Harries; released by Miramax Films. Running time: 103 minutes. Shown tonight at 8:15 at Alice Tully Hall and at 9 at Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center, Manhattan, the opening night of the 44th New York Film Festival.

WITH: Helen Mirren (the Queen), Michael Sheen (Tony Blair), James Cromwell (Prince Philip), Sylvia Syms (the Queen Mother), Alex Jennings (Prince Charles), Helen McCrory (Cherie Blair), Roger Allam (Sir Robin Janvrin) and Tim McMullan (Stephen Lamport).

[ITALIANO]

God bless Helen Mirren. I just saw "The Queen", which was the most applauded movie at the Venice Film Festival, and I can tell you: it's true, she's terrific. We all know that she's the kind of actress that - at least in the last years - usually gets nominated at the Oscars only to be beaten by some hot sexy young American starlet... but this time things could be different. Mirren gives a performance which effortlessly blends technique and feelings - and the result is a true gem. This is not an American actress trying desperately to imitate a real person's looks, appearence and surface - a la Jamie Foxx in "Ray", or even a la Philip Seymour Hoffman in "Capote". Mirren can do much more than that - she can bring us inside her character, and does so with an insight and a depth which truly belong to a unique acting tradition, the British one. She's about ten years younger, I think, than Elizabeth II was at the time of Diana's death, and it shows, but this is not really important - it's the soul which matters, and the soul is there.
The movie itself is, of course, a good one, intelligent, well - if not always subtly - written, with good points to make about the British monarchy and its contradictions - actually, in a larger context, about the British character, the British people, its constant, I'd say cultural (and psychological) dilemma between feeling emotions and showing them. And in doing so it is, also, a very British movie - admirably distant in dealing with a historical event which is, after all, very recent, still never forgetting the leading character's human side, and treating it with warmth, humour and understanding. Other, minor characters are more sketchily drawn, but the Queen and Tony Blair - a young, still hopeful Tony Blair, not the grotesque US fan he became later - and their growing relationship are very well portrayed, and the final scene between them is a great example of character interplay.
But this is Helen Mirren's movie. And the way she owns it, the way she portrays her character's slow personal change without resorting to hystrionics, but rather through glances, and the tenseness of her face gradually getting less and less tight - well, I hope it will get all the recognitions it deserves, not only on this side of the Atlantic.

[rudeboy]

01. There is one major thing standing in the way of a Helen Mirren victory: There hasn't been a Best Actress winner over 40 since Susan Sarandon in Dead Man Walking and there hasn't been a FEMALE acting winner over 50 since Judi Dench in Shakespeare in Love. Helen Mirren is 61. She would have to sweep all the pre-cursor awards to be a lock.

I don't think anyone would suggest Mirren is the done-deal winner just yet. But I don't think the points you make stand in her way. Yes, it's been a while since an older actress won the lead oscar, but it wouldn't exactly set a precedent - remember, Jessica Tandy won over hot young thing and critics award sweeper Michelle Pfeiffer. I really don't think age will stand in her way. It's just that older lady roles, for better or worse, haven't received the across the board attention the last few years that have greeted the controversial, some would say risky choices made by Swank, Berry, Theron and co.

Mirren is a well-respected actress who has paid her dues, like Sarandon - and one who has never been afraid of taking 'risky' roles in the past. She managed a nomination for King George, in which she really didn't do all that much, and was probably second in the running when nominated for Gosford Park. The fact that she's playing a real-life, still-living, hugely familiar and controversial role guarantees mass attention. She's as much in the running as any other contender.

[VanHelsing]

I don't think Mirren is a lock to win. But as a nominee, I feel she's definitely in.

[anonymous1980]

A couple of points I have to make:

01. There is one major thing standing in the way of a Helen Mirren victory: There hasn't been a Best Actress winner over 40 since Susan Sarandon in Dead Man Walking and there hasn't been a FEMALE acting winner over 50 since Judi Dench in Shakespeare in Love. Helen Mirren is 61. She would have to sweep all the pre-cursor awards to be a lock.

02. A screenplay based on a real life event (or a real life person) can be considered original if it's not primarily based on any particlar book or article or play.

[99-1100896887]

Thank you for this posting, rudeboy. It was very enlightening.

[rudeboy]

Mark Lawson in The Guardian on portrayals of the Windsors.

British showbusiness contains two curious rituals, relics of a more deferential age. Periodically a movie is selected for a screening called the "royal command performance", traditionally an uplifting picture, after which Elizabeth II or a designated relative will touch hands with the stars. And, more quietly, a senior TV executive annually compiles a bag of programmes to be sent to the Windsors for their holiday viewing.

This year, a cinema-television co-production that technically qualifies for both honours can reliably be expected to be given neither. The Queen - directed by Stephen Frears from a script by Peter Morgan, with Helen Mirren's Elizabeth II cheered by audiences at the Venice film festival - dramatises the lowest moment of Royal popularity since the abdication crisis, when the monarch was perceived to have shown insufficient public grief for her son's ex-wife, killed in a Paris car crash.
The reaction of some critics and audiences will be that The Queen, while an entertaining piece of speculation, is the kind of thing that ought to be on television, where the previous Frears-Morgan collaboration - The Deal, a Channel 4 drama about the Blair-Brown feud - was seen. And, indeed, TV cash in the budget means that it will be seen fairly rapidly on ITV1. But the release of The Queen in the cinema is more than a simple distribution decision: it completes a revolution in the national attitude to royal drama.

The BBC Programmes Policy Guide for Writers and Producers, published in 1948, warned on page 8 against "the use in a fictional setting of a character identifiable with a living person" and, on page 12, advises that "all impersonations need the permission of the people being impersonated and producers must reassure themselves that this has been given before allowing any broadcast". The booklet specifically outlaws impressions of Sir Winston Churchill or other "leading political figures", but makes no specific prohibition against playing the king or queen. This omission is not as surprising as it may seem: broadcasters of this period knew that mocking a monarch would lead to the end of their careers, social disgrace and possibly imprisonment.

ITV, beginning in the mid-1950s, and though theoretically more commercial and daring, largely extended the same deference. In 1975, when ATV made Edward the Seventh, with Timothy West heavily whiskered up, there was such concern about even the depiction of such a distant ancestor of the serving monarch that the scripts were reportedly submitted to the palace for approval - which was given to such an extent that sequences were filmed at Sandringham and Windsor.

That co-operation seems to have given the drama departments courage and, within three years, Thames was screening a drama about the royal family's black sheep. Edward and Mrs Simpson was rumoured to have upset both the Queen and the Queen Mother, who reputedly refused to allow her brother-in-law's abdication-causing yankee mistress to be mentioned in her presence. The Duchess of Windsor herself took legal action from her Paris exile to prevent the series being shown in France. If even televising the Windsor relatives caused such fuss, TV executives, who tended to be up for a knighthood when they retired or were sacked, were unlikely to start dramatising the current firm. Fictional representations of them were restricted to gently comic appearances by queen-lookalike Jeanette Charles on The Mike Yarwood Show.

Television in America - which had a long tradition of fictionalising its heads of state, whether admired, assassinated or impeached - ignored British protocols. Within a year of the 1981 marriage known at the time as the "wedding of the century", there had been two network movies of the week: The Royal Romance of Charles and Diana, and Charles and Diana: A Royal Love Story.
In these, British Equity dependables such as Margaret Tyzack and Charles Gray portrayed senior royals. There was, however, an absolute understanding - on which some of the actors were said to have insisted - that these dramas would never be screened in the UK. As the scripts romantically attributed greatness and grandeur to the royals, this ban makes clear that British TV was not afraid merely of offensive representation: any depiction at all was considered lese-majesty.

Revealingly, the first substantial dramatisation of Elizabeth II came not from television, but in the theatre, with the character identified as HMQ in the script of Alan Bennett's A Question of Attribution, his 1988 play for the National Theatre in which the monarch converses with her art adviser, Sir Anthony Blunt, soon to be exposed as a spy.

Yet, even in this case, the board of the National was so opposed to allowing Prunella Scales to pretend to be the Queen that Richard Eyre, artistic director of the NT, revealed in his diaries that he had to threaten to resign in order to get the play staged. Again, the objections seem strange, because HMQ is depicted throughout as witty and wise, a leftish playwright's dream of what a constitutional monarch might be.
Three years later, when A Question of Attribution was filmed for television, there was again discussion at BBC board level but, by now, the taboo was reducing. Spitting Image had included the Windsors in its rubber repertory company - intererestingly gentle with the Queen, but targeting the alleged heavy drinking of Princess Margaret and the Queen Mum - and Rory Bremner frequently played both the Queen and Diana.

The distinction between satire and drama was unlikely to hold for long, especially when, before the truth about the wedding of the century was admitted, in 1992 American television was reversing its previous fairytale with Charles and Diana: Unhappily Ever After. Finally, it was fact that freed the way for fiction. When, in the mid-90s, Diana and Charles flapped their marital dirty linen at Martin Bashir and Jonathan Dimbleby respectively, the royals, by behaving like politicians, were regarded as inviting the political risk of dramatisation.
The loss of royal authority after Diana's death, depicted in The Queen, further encouraged drama departments. By last year, scripts once filmable only in America entered British TV peak-time, including Channel 4's irreverent Princess Margaret and ITV1's Whatever Love Means, a dramatisation of the Diana-Charles-Camilla triangle, in which the lookalikes were as speculative as the dialogue.

However, even those dramas were wary of showing Elizabeth II, using the Duke of Edinburgh and Princess Anne as surrogates for her assumed views. So the fact that The Queen - the first ever critical depiction of the monarch in mainstream British drama - is receiving a cinema release, has represented Britain in the Venice Film Festival, and will be screened next year on ITV1 rather than a minority network beamed from abroad, is above all measure of the remarkable extent to which the monarch has lost any special protection in British visual culture.

Yet paradoxically, given that this freedom to dramatise the palace results from a breakdown of traditional British hierarchies, the decision to make Morgan's and Frears' film for the big screen also represents snobbery. Directors, writers and actors have always felt a glow from opening in an Odeon rather than going out on a Wednesday at nine, not least because an Oscar far outranks a Bafta in mantlepiece impact. And, as the increasing number of TV channels spread on to an ever multiplying number of platforms, with programmes available online and even mobile phones, a snobbish preference for cinema's festivals, red-carpet premieres and lengthy solus reviews increases. Documentaries, a small-screen staple, are now a strong movie genre, and the celluloid honouring of The Queen represents a similar desire to queen it over the flow of nightly, disposable shows.

But cinema may also be the right place for The Queen, because it finally has more in common with Hollywood than the peak-time schedules. This distinction has positive and negative aspects.

To the work's credit, the quality of acting (especially from Mirren and Michael Sheen as Blair), dialogue and camerawork place it far beyond such opportunistic soaps as Charles and Diana: Happily Ever After and Whatever Love Means. But, in the red-ink ledger, it has a far looser relationship with reality than The Deal.

This is simply because Westminster is a leakier place, and filled with more people willing to brief screenwriters off the record, than Balmoral or Buck House. The Queen essentially reflects Blair and Campbell's account to friends of how they got the Windsors sorted during Diana week and so, ironically, a drama that depicts the prime minister at the peak of his political efficiency is being released at the weakest moment of his premiership.

But, while the Sedgefield and Downing Street scenes belong recognisably to the television tradition of faction, the royal sequences are more clearly a celluloid fiction. Morgan has neatly vacuumed up monarchist gossip - such as the suggestion that Prince Phillip's nickname for the Queen may be "cabbage" - but the film can never offer more than an elegant guess about what the emotions and conversation of Diana's former mother-in-law really were.

In that sense, it is fitting that the film should premiere in a genre with a long tradition of glossy biopics which only loosely reproduce the subject's life and which are routinely preceded by a legal disclaimer that no resemblance to any actual person or events is intended. The Queen knows her place.

[Reza]

I don't think ANY voters will hold Caligula against her.

I was just satirizing the ridiculous argument that someone doesn't deserve to be nominated because they were in "Dawson's Creek" or "The Karate Kid III" some years ago.

Sorry didn't understand!